I sit up, tired; the worms in my bowels are staging a labour protest.
I get up, switch on the light and gaze at the silver-rimmed wall
clock. 9:15pm. I yawn and stretch like a lazy cat.
There is food in the kitchen but I will rather starve than eat another
plate of it. It now tastes like rubber.
I stand up, stretch again, put on a black tank top, my leather
slippers and make for the back door.
"Where are you going to by this time of the night?" her voice halts
me, just as I walk past her room door.
"Mum, I want to go buy indomie," I say.
"By this time? Is there no food in the--"
"I don't want to eat rice."
She pauses for a while, rummages in her leopard-skin handbag and
fishes out a thousand naira note.
"Take. Buy me bread. The big round one. And be back fast."
I stretch out my hand, she places the money there. I make to leave,
she holds on to my fingers and say in our Owerri dialect, that sounds
like French sometimes, "Be careful. Night is evil."
She releases me. I walk out of her room, past the kitchen, through the
termite-infested door and into the moonlit, starry night.
The sounds and sights of the windy night rush over me, enveloping me.
The euphoria I feel make me miss the nightly jaunts of my
undergraduate days. I sigh. Everything seems so right.
There is no one on the street. I sight a shop still open and walk
briskly toward it.
I get there and walk into it. The yellow bulb dangling from the high
cobweb-filled ceiling casts a gloomy depressing atmosphere in the
shop. The attendant stands up from a low seat just as I'm about to
call out. She is not beautiful. She looks groggy, enhancing her
unattractiveness. I make my orders, give her the money and wait, my
right foot tapping the floor - my normal venting whenever I'm
impatient.
She's efficient. Very fast. She puts all I requested into a green
nylon bag and hands it to me, just as she offers me my balance. I
collect them and thank her. As I turn to leave, Amobi, my friend walks
in.
"Guy, how far?" he says. I smile. He has forgotten my name...again.
"Amobi, I dey. Sup na?" I reply.
"I dey, my man. I just dey jare."
I look at him. He is here. But he is not here. His eyes are drear,
like a smile had passed.
"I'm going. Goodnight."
"Wait. Did you hear?" he asks, recovering his mind from whatever chasm
he had cast it.
"Hear what?"
"Somebody died."
"My man, I heard o. The cousin of that guy that sells fake films,
right? He's even owing me, I just don't know how to go and meet him
now his cousin is dead. I'll appear heartless."
I sigh and scratch my afro-cut hair. His face wears an incredulous look.
"What are you saying? You're talking of something that happened some
days ago, I'm talking of something that just happened twenty minutes
ago."
"How? What happened?"
"Accident. Somebody died---"
He keeps talking while I give the attendant the nylon bag to hold for
me, that I will soon be back.
"---the small boy. Even the driver don run," he finishes.
I grab his arm. "Guy, come show me."
He agrees, reluctantly.
We enter the road where PZ Company is situated. He points to a crowd
down the road and says, "There. Jus go. I nor wan see am again."
He sits on the raised sidewalk, his countenance resolute.
I walk a bit, and then run toward the point of attraction. I get
there. People are clustered in groups, blocking the road. I join one
of the groups where a middle-aged woman, with
Christian-mother-kind-of-arms with stretch marks that look like angry
tattoo, summarizes her story and starts over again. Like a professional
In less than twenty minutes, I get the gist. A luxury bus driver,
while trying to navigate the small space left on the road as a result
of 18-wheeler trucks parked on the same road, had killed a 10-years
old boy, crushing his skull in the process.
People cry out at this point as if they don't already know the story.
I feel numb. I look further down the road. I see the back of a
multi-coloured luxury bus parked at the road end. On the tarred road,
some feet before the bus is a burden on the ground, covered, just
beside the gutter. I walk up to it. It is the corpse, covered with a
blood-stained white long sleeve shirt. Two child-like legs stick out
from under it. Blood and things that appear as chunks of meat
everywhere. Brain matter. I shudder.
I cross the gutter and look down directly at the corpse.
Then I feel that part of me that looks for a story in everything kick
in. Suddenly, I feel cold, indifferent. I'm suprised and ashamed at my
reaction. I do not want to be squeamish, but callousness is worse.
There are worse ways to die, my muse says, this one is terrific
nonetheless. I shake my head.
"Is this my brother?" a male voice cries behind me, "God forbid". I
turn around, just as the screams of the just arrived young man tears
the tension.
I hear police sirens. I remember mother's warnings. I'm late. The
crowd begins to disperse.
I shake my head and jog back home.
Adieu, Unknown.
